HEADINGS :- / Discovery / Details of Event / Acknowledgements / / 2nd Discovery / Lunar Eclipse June 20th, 3340BC / Lunar Eclipse Dec 14th, 3340BC / Criticisms of Solar Eclipse / New Moon Sighting Record / Interpretation of Petroglyphs & Eclipse Deduction / Delta T Overview / Lunar Acceleration Measurements / Scientific Modelling...... / Factors of Earth's Rotation........ / DU Program Compared to JPL Horizons / JPL Source Sheets / Sun & Moon Positions per JPL / Comparison of DU to JPL Reduced / Sun's Reduced Position / Doppelganger Experiment / Methodology / Criteria for Doppelganger Experiment / Doppelganger ....... Results / Summary Conclusions / Further Criticisms Raised / Weight of Evidence for Discoveries... / Implications for Neolithic Iconography Decipherment / recommendations / Webography / bibliography
On June 20th, at 20 :23 :59 UT , the moon arose fully eclipsed at azimuth 127° 05 mins and altitide - 00°11mins with a phase angle of 0.394°. This is just a little west of Cairn L entrance itself . It started going out of eclipse at approximately 21: 1 :59 UT. This is shown as the lowest triple concentric circle on the stone at a delta t of 104629 seconds .
On December 14th, 2 weeks after the solar eclipse, the Neolithics witnessed the year's second lunar eclipse at 16 : 23: 59 UT at azimuth 54° 06 mins and altitude - 00° 10 mins. AS it climbed the night sky ,it went deep red at approximately 12 ° altitude at a Deltat time of 104608 seconds.
For this reason I believe the Neolithics inserted these two eclipses in a symbolic spatial relationship with the December one being the highest engraved on the eclipse stone. You can readily surmise that the surface of the affronting stone basin, underneath of which the charred remains of the previous sacrifice were entombed, represents a symbolic horizon line and therefore the lunar petroglyphs are shown cleverly spaced. As I'm coming to notice the Neolithics appeared to work stones in composities attempting to house as much information in fragmented "collage" scenes to bear witness to events of a celestial nature or otherwise. Since this site is the oldest lunar eclipse tracking complex (older than Stonehenge Phase One 3010 BC - 2950 BC) its not unreasonable for these peoples to carve this stone in such a reverant way.
In attempting to get people noticed on this event I received some very interesting criticism from various individuals both professional and amateur. essentially, they were broken down into two main areas and opinions on interpretation. One concerning whether the Neolithics had such sharp eyesight that they could see the rising moon ahead of the sun on the eclipse day. and delta t. Lets take the first one first, that's the easier of the two.
It was the president of the Irish Astronomical Association, Terry Mozel, who showed convincingly that it was impossible to have seen the rising New Moon(technically waning cresent, 5 hours from new phase) on the eclipse day.This has to do with atmospherics, refraction of light, the moon having such a thin filament of albedo to it that the Neolithics could not possibly have seen it above the horizon at that position. The world record for the first sighting of a New Moon is 17 hours before New Moon phase begins. Even if there was thin cloud cover over the sun this would still not diminsh the fact that they could not have seen it. We all agreed with this.
In agreeing as such we opened up another fascinatiing idea, which Terry pointed out, appeared to make the Neolithics possess 'sophisticated' knowledge of heavenly movements. Notice I place the precautionary word in quotes. This meant 2 possibilities could have taken place, either the neolithics had already observed the PREVIOUS day's (Nov 29th) moon come up the horizon, remembered that it happened and ESTIMATED where it would be in the sky the next day (eclipse day)!! That strongly implies that they would have to have roughly observed and somehow recorded the spatial position, say in clay, of the sun and moon over a long time and were lying in wait to see something prior to its occurance. This moon on the Nov 30th was repeated almost to the same position exactly 19years prior (3359BC) to that and again at 3378 BC. Could they have anticipated the workings of the Metonic cycle before Meton 'rediscovered ' it.That is an interesting area for study.
Or the other possibility is that they inserted the moon for Nov 29th ,prior day, on the stone 20 after the eclipse occurred without prior knowledge of its Metonic tracking in the sky and noted that the moon was getting close to the sun, maybe an eclipse ahead!! I've accounted for all the symbol representations (personal interpretation) on that stone 20 and cannot account for it occurring in a different way. The spiral has been interpreted by others (Brennan) as a moon symbol and the stone itself, to me at least, is evidence of a Neolithic way of 'engraved composites'
So how could they possibly have kept track of the 19 years of the Metonic cycle. It presupposes that they stumbled across this by tracking something else. As mentioned above it is suggestive of 'sophisticated' knowledge but a methodogy I'm going to mention now refutes that idea. I believe the tracking was far simplier than imagined. Firstly they had to overcome the inclement weather.On the loughcrew complex there is only one cairn that tracks the sun over the equinoxes. All they had to do was record the occurance of the sun streaming into cairn T across the hilltop every two equinox periods per year. in fact the equinox may have been their 'solar calendar'. It appears that they delibrately widened the passageways of both Cairn T and L to facilitate this. That took care of the weather problem. So how did they record? What came to light for me was the occurance and reoccurance of mysterious stone spheres, almost perfectly round composed of syenite,chalk, granite and various other stone types. These were unearthed inside the megalithic cairns across Ireland. Nobody has been adequately able to understand what they were for. Simply drop a sphere of a particular stone type and surface marking into a recess inside the cairn chamber for each equinox occurance. You could drop one sphere to represent one occurance of the sun's rays and other spheres to represent the number of days the sun streamed in during the equinox period. Let's say its one per equinox period, that's 38 over a nineteen year Metonic period. That took care of the time reckoning to approximately Mid October in 3340 BC. They then simply observed the sun cutting the horizon from cairns T to L until the sun streamed into cairn L. The moon, at night , would also have cut the horizon in various phases. When it became obvious that the rising moon was happening closer and closer to dawn and the sun was getting closer to it (moon) then they paid attention.
That's simply one idea, other researchers might have a different tack on it. It certainly gives a purpose to the spheres discovered and their different sizes, markings etc.
Users of planitarium programs are probably wondering why their program will not show this eclipse.At the moment I can find two other programs that show this eclipse where it should be, geographically. These are Skymap 3.2, default settings and Lodestar Pro GS , a MS-DOS based program which shows a beautiful rendition by the manipulation of something called a Delta T program (more about that further on and how to see the eclipse through the Lodestar program). There are many commercial programs on the market with various degrees of accuracy to choose from. The makeup of a program generically should consist of a theory of planetary orbits (i.e. Sun and other planets), a theory for stellar positions, a theory of lunar motion and a Delta T component formula. These theories should be itemized in the program's documentation. For the theory of planetary motion you can use various subsets of VSOP87 produced by Pierre Bretagnon and G. Francou. For the Moon or lunar theory the current crop of theories consists of the ELP 2000 series. Delta T can be considered as a small theory of lunar motion which is tacked onto the position and orbit of the moon after the main ELP2000 series theory is applied. With these various theories there is a specific measure of lunar orbital acceleration((n-dot) --a combination of solar acceleration(c') and lunar acceleration(c)AKA Lunar Acceleration Parameter(LAP) ) to be also applied to the moon's position. Essentially these theories set up the positions of the various planets and stars you see whenever you change the date on your program. For instance the DIGITAL UNIVERSE edition that I have (V2.30) has the VSOP87 subset D for the planetary theory of motion; the ELP2000 -85 series produced by Michelle Chapront-Touze and Jean Chapront(1988 or 1991 edition) for the lunar theory of motion and the Delta T formula of Stephenson & Houlden (1986 edition). The lunar orbital acceleration(n-dot) which, was first intimated by Edmund Halley in 1695, is set in your program and governed by the ELP2000 series theory of lunar motion and the Delta T formula. In the Digital Universe the lunar orbital acceleration for the ELP 2000- 85 series (1988 or 1991) is set at -23.8946 arcseconds per Julian century squared (i.e. notation -23.8946"/cy²) In some literature the superscript will appear as a minus 2. For the Delta t formula we have -26.0000"/cy².The programmer can mix and match lunar motion theories and Delta T formulae regardless of the mix in lunar orbital acceleration. The Skymap version 3.2 program has the same theories along with the same subset of the VSOP87 theory of planetary motion which gives a difference of approximately 2 - 12 arcseconds between the two programs on the horizon co ordinate system (altitude and azimuth) when you compare them. Therefore the lunar theory (ELP 2000 series) will give you the penultimate position and orbit of the Moon. The sticky point comes over the application of any Delta T program. THE RATE OF ROTATION OF THE EARTH IS ERRATIC, UNPREDICTABLE. The earth rotates about its axis and wobbles about at the poles. We know that each day's rotation gives us a 24 hour period. However in 1955 atomic clocks were introduced to help with precise measurements prior to the space race program. These clocks measure the frequency of an atom of Caesium 133 (radioactive material) to very precise and fine measurements. It soon became apparent that there was a slight difference between the rotational 'clock'(UT =Universal Time) and these atomic ones (DT= Dynamic Time). That difference is very very tiny in one day but when you go backwards in time over millennia the accumulation of this 'clock error' builds up. Another name for this is 'discrepancy in time'. The question is by how much does this 'clock error' measure back in time. As mentioned above in capital letters the rotation of the earth is unpredictable and is governed by many interacting and sometimes opposing forces. Therefore the measure of Delta T can only be ascertained by direct or indirect means i.e. empirically. Eclipses are used to measure or get more precisely ' a snapshot' over time of the 'clock error'. This becomes problematic the further you go back in time. For example , the lunar orbital acceleration (n-dot) measurement uses the following media of empirical means.
The only direct measurements of the lunar orbital acceleration(n-dot) come from two sources lunar lazer ranging, placed on the moon by the Apollo astronauts in 1969AD and the perturbation of artificial satellities measured by Christodoulidis et al. in 1988AD.
